A reasonable response might be to ask, But what if that master is an omniscient polymath, and the wide-eyed acolyte is
paralysed by the fear of never matching up?
Perfection is no inspiration at all.
When
the master I didn't realise I was ready for appeared in 1989,
conjuring himself from within the pages of his Unreliable
Memoirs like
an aphoristic djinn, his effect on me was an urge to snap every pen
and pencil in my bedsit and go outside to beat up some nerds. I
had enjoyed scribbling my thoughts since I'd been old enough to do
so. At the age of 16 I had even begun to wonder if I might become
good at it. But how could an uneducated teenage labourer hope to
acquire a little skill with the English language when it was clearly
too late? There was none to spare: Clive James had acquired it all.
The confidence to take one tentative step into his realm returned
only when I realised that Clive James the poet, the essayist, the
critic, the journalist, the novelist, all round prose stylist and insatiable cultural omnivore was also the same tubby, balding Clive
James with a talpine squint seen on television in the 1980s and 90s, usually taking the piss
out of Japanese people as they were lowered into vats of cockroaches.
My master was human after all; or he was at least adept at
appearing as such, which, for this insecure apprentice, was just
encouragement enough.
No, Clive James never was a teacher at Millbrook Secondary School in Southampton. Nonetheless, he has been teaching anyone who cares to read and learn ever since the 1970s. He was there for me when I left school and then my childhood home, which had offered selected works from a few fields of study, to enter the world beyond, which offered everything. Clive James presented informed reinterpretation of the little I thought I knew, followed by introductions to entirely new cultural realms. A not particularly clever child, but always an intensely curious one, I found my early introduction to full-time unskilled work a good reason to spend my free hours filling in the blanks. Yet in reference sections of the library, in the History and Classics sections of bookshops, and in cafes where you went for a coffee rather than a breakfast of fried pig, I was a working-class immigrant. So I knew I had found the Virgil to guide me through this world of big words, and even bigger thoughts, when I discovered the first volume of autobiography by a pathfinder: a man who had turned the perspective of working-class immigrant into an entertaining media persona and a “mandarin yet demotic” literary style.
No, Clive James never was a teacher at Millbrook Secondary School in Southampton. Nonetheless, he has been teaching anyone who cares to read and learn ever since the 1970s. He was there for me when I left school and then my childhood home, which had offered selected works from a few fields of study, to enter the world beyond, which offered everything. Clive James presented informed reinterpretation of the little I thought I knew, followed by introductions to entirely new cultural realms. A not particularly clever child, but always an intensely curious one, I found my early introduction to full-time unskilled work a good reason to spend my free hours filling in the blanks. Yet in reference sections of the library, in the History and Classics sections of bookshops, and in cafes where you went for a coffee rather than a breakfast of fried pig, I was a working-class immigrant. So I knew I had found the Virgil to guide me through this world of big words, and even bigger thoughts, when I discovered the first volume of autobiography by a pathfinder: a man who had turned the perspective of working-class immigrant into an entertaining media persona and a “mandarin yet demotic” literary style.
Reading James's writing is effortless. Writing about James's writing is
extremely difficult. This is the most difficult subject I've
ever attempted. Even to commit to it seems like an arrogant
suggestion that my own powers of critique could be worthy of his.
They are not. But it is a self-contradiction to describe someone as
inspirational while moaning that they make you want to raise your
game. I hope that my descriptive abilities are at least equal to my own
thoughts and feelings regarding the effect that Clive James has had
on me because, for thirty years, he has been teaching me how I might
go about expressing both.
Attempting
to share appreciation of my hero's work with friends or colleagues
has proven frustrating for all concerned. James himself has written
repeatedly about the “velvet shackles of a reputation”. For the
graduate of both Sydney and Cambridge Universities to become the
writer and host of an extremely popular TV chat show, and a weekend
programme that offered footage of Japanese gameshow contestants being
tortured in ways that even my maternal grandfather (who faced
Bushido-era demons in Burma) could not have dreamed up, was to risk
his already enviable reputation as a man of letters. Sadly, very few
devotees of Clive
James on Television knew
that he had such a potent reputation to
dilute. This remains true, despite the craftsmanship and cultural insights on show in his popular travel programmes. As
I remember the Postcard documentaries, they seemed to offer the antidote to the standard
Wicker's
World format
of televised travelogues, illuminating and rebranding places in the
world that had previously seemed dark and dangerous, but which
suddenly seemed inviting after some eloquent appreciation and gentle
ridicule by Clive James.
That
people recently asked “Who?” when I talked about reading
his translation of The Divine Comedy, followed up with, “I remember only the
Australian Clive James who danced with Kylie on telly,” did not
surprise me. Despite his indefatigable decades of poetry, journalism
and criticism, it was James's televisual output that made him a
household name. Having your own show on TV remains the statement of
greatest achievement in popular esteem, though it might not seem so
if your brain is as big as Clive James's, which Clive James's happens
to be. He cheerfully admits to wanting it both ways, but it seems to
me that his grace of movement in varying cultural depths is simply
something else about the man to admire. To express scholarly insight
into areas of artistic, historical and political interest considered
difficult by many, and do so in a conversational prose, all the while applying the same intellect to an entertainment format which, at it's
very best, should look as though it requires very little wit, and
provoke applause from people who extol the virtue of possessing none, is a rare achievement indeed.
The
common voice discussing uncommon subjects is an exceptionally strong
handhold for the newcomer seeking a reassuring grip on scary new
subjects. Throw in wry humour, memorable aperçus, and a failure by the author to exclude
his own eyebrow-waggling ego, and he pulls off the trick of reassuring readers who lack a
classical education – or, in fact, any formal learning beyond GCSE
or A-Level – that tweed-clad stuffiness is not the only way of
discussing serious subjects.
To
my knowledge, Clive James has avoided the question of reconciliation
between perceptions of popular and 'highbrow' culture by pretending
that there never was a rift to begin with. As he records in May Week Was in June, "Croce had made me feel better about being unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between high art and popular art... [They] were united to the extent that they were inspired. Within the unity conferred by inspiration, all categories were illusory." If the erstwhile Flash of
Lightning was able to develop an articulate appreciation of
Florentine sculptors, then clearly there is something universally
relatable within culture at every altitude of brow that speaks
directly to us as human beings, not only as dukes or dunny men, and
which does not require the intercession of St. Catz.
James achieves this with a consistency of style in all aspects of his oeuvre. The wit and somehow self-effacing arrogance are ever present. When writing on subjects less serious than the lethal tyrannies of the 20th Century, James's printed ego allows him to relate to the smouldering charisma, athleticism and sexual prowess of movie stars and sporting legends. He could have been either or both of those things, but, you know, he didn't wanna. And so, having levelled the playing field between himself and the god-like focus of his essay, James is at liberty to express with distilled brevity and addictive wit what other critics fail to communicate with endless pages of dry description. His opening sentence is usually a 'Welcome' mat on the way into a subject, settling us into a stance of comfortable ease as we contemplate the next line, leaving us all the more surprised when James pulls the rug out from beneath our feet at end of the paragraph, bringing us to the floor either suffocating with laughter at one of his comical similes evoking the previous description, or else prostrate in shock at an incisive and invariably quotable summation of his argument.
James achieves this with a consistency of style in all aspects of his oeuvre. The wit and somehow self-effacing arrogance are ever present. When writing on subjects less serious than the lethal tyrannies of the 20th Century, James's printed ego allows him to relate to the smouldering charisma, athleticism and sexual prowess of movie stars and sporting legends. He could have been either or both of those things, but, you know, he didn't wanna. And so, having levelled the playing field between himself and the god-like focus of his essay, James is at liberty to express with distilled brevity and addictive wit what other critics fail to communicate with endless pages of dry description. His opening sentence is usually a 'Welcome' mat on the way into a subject, settling us into a stance of comfortable ease as we contemplate the next line, leaving us all the more surprised when James pulls the rug out from beneath our feet at end of the paragraph, bringing us to the floor either suffocating with laughter at one of his comical similes evoking the previous description, or else prostrate in shock at an incisive and invariably quotable summation of his argument.
There
never was much to the assumption that a sentence is only ever read
diachronically from left to right with never a backward glance: the
eye doesn't work that way and neither does prose. But there is still
something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets
to the end of it, should be intelligible by the time he does, and
that if he has been forced to begin again he has been hoodwinked into
helping the writer do the writing. Readers of Gibbon don't just help:
they join a chain gang, and the chain gang is in a salt mine, and the
salt mine is reached after a long trip by galley, during which they
are never excused the feel of the oar or the snap of the lash.
–Cultural
Amnesia, P.265
And James is never ignorant of the comic possibilities of placing the higher register in juxtaposition with the vernacular.
The dunny man, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his tragedy, had not
yet risen to his feet. Needless to say, the contents of the pan had
been fully divulged. All the stuff had come out.
–Unreliable Memoirs, P.48
James's prose still tends towards the aphoristic when discussing more
serious subjects, though the end-of-paragraph zingers leave the
reader reeling rather than laughing, and his on-page persona mutates
from the humorous showman brightening cheerier texts
into a comforting authority of conviction. The man has done his
homework, so he will not weaken the force of his argument by
suggesting that maybe, possibly, this is what someone might have been thinking
when they acted as they did. No, he will assert that "Hitler
needed no telling that there were a lot of brilliant Jews from whom
German-speaking culture had gained lustre. That was what he was
afraid of: of a bacillus being called clever, and of the
phosphorescence of decay being hailed as illumination."
It is this self-assurance for which James seems most often
criticised, and self-deluding arrogance certainly is the comedy
catalyst for each of his setbacks throughout his memoirs. Since he
can't stifle his ego, he flaunts it. But the word ego is so
frequently treated as a pejorative that it seems necessary to repeat
that the discursive tool of stamping each page so indelibly with this
persona is exactly that: a stylistic device. The man away from pen
and paper may well be a narcissist, but he is too deliberate a writer
to include anything in his work that is not being employed to get his
reader on side, or to illustrate a point. And anyone who knows James's
work well enough to criticise him for the number of words he employs
talking about himself should not need reminding that he has used
many, many more words detailing his thoroughly qualified appreciation of
other people.
Though passionate on every subject, James's work contains an ever-fruitful seam of advocacy for the defence of humanism, liberal democracy, and simultaneous admiration for anyone who has ever spoken publicly against the totalitarian regime in which they lived (and were executed. His Cultural Amnesia is dedicated to the memory of Sophie Scholl.) He names and acclaims 20th Century masters of language such as Karl Kraus, George Orwell, Albert Camus, and others who were usually the first to identify the true intentions of demagogues and future tyrants by decoding their speeches. It is Clive James's great fear that the experiences and wisdom of people who were silenced by having their brains stamped out by jackboots will be forgotten, allowing us to make the same mistakes that darkened the 20th Century make the 21st Century darker still.
Though passionate on every subject, James's work contains an ever-fruitful seam of advocacy for the defence of humanism, liberal democracy, and simultaneous admiration for anyone who has ever spoken publicly against the totalitarian regime in which they lived (and were executed. His Cultural Amnesia is dedicated to the memory of Sophie Scholl.) He names and acclaims 20th Century masters of language such as Karl Kraus, George Orwell, Albert Camus, and others who were usually the first to identify the true intentions of demagogues and future tyrants by decoding their speeches. It is Clive James's great fear that the experiences and wisdom of people who were silenced by having their brains stamped out by jackboots will be forgotten, allowing us to make the same mistakes that darkened the 20th Century make the 21st Century darker still.
And this fear is expressed no more eloquently than in his Hilter's
Unwitting Exculpator, an endlessly compelling and still relevant
review of Daniel J. Goldhagan's Hitler's Willing Executioners
(1996, Alfred A.Knopf). The text is a masterclass in essay
construction, bearing as it does the combined loads of its weighty
subject, James's unbounded knowledge, a devastating yet civilised
refutation of Goldhagan's thesis, and jaw-dropping examples of the
music the English language can achieve when conducted by a maestro.
Reviewing
James's Cultural
Amnesia, Christopher
Hitchens described it as “an account of how an educator has himself
been self-educated”. To raise James' autodidacticism as praise, or
even at all, doesn't seem to be saying very much, unless we believe
that people learn everything they know only during their years of
formal education. Syllabi are the jumping off points for learning:
nobody achieves a first-class degree by quoting lecturers back at
themselves. (James admits that he treated the syllabus at Cambridge as an indication of what he shouldn't be reading.) Hitchens' compliment must be in the breadth
of
James's knowledge, since self-education is so often sweetened into
unpalatability by cherry-picking. Which is just as well considering
how high James sets the bar for his peers, and therefore for himself:
“Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic always:
if your judgement doesn't bring in more of the world than it shuts
out, you shouldn't start.” And “A good critic knows about movies," James wrote, "because he knows about the world.”
Of course, it might be suggested that James's canon represents a handy bluffer's guide. If we read what he's writing then we need not read what he's reviewing
– except that James's critiques are simply too effusive to be
anything other than an incentive to read everything.
Clive James was diagnosed with leukemia in April 2011. In June 2012 he described himself as “near the end”. In 2015 he upgraded his condition to “embarrassed” because he was still alive. As I type this sentence on the 6th May 2018, I believe that alive-but-embarrassed-about-it may continue to be the state of things for my ailing Virgil, which I am happy about, though I lament the reduction in the volume of his output. In the past few years he has produced a weekly column entitled “Reports of my Death...” for The Guardian, and a volume of essays reviewing the DVD boxsets he has binge-watched whilst ill. But my hope of seeing a sixth volume of his memoirs is fading, and I know we'll never see another collection of essays to rival The Meaning of Recognition or Even As We Speak, which is why I have been keen to compose these lines before we learn that his TV-viewing days have come to an end. Clive James once wrote Requiem, a piece devoted to his grief following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I found it unreadable. I don't doubt the sincerity of the emotion that inspired it – indeed, James's bleak mood must have been the reason for such a poorly judged piece – but I am keen to avoid making a similar mistake. Sentimentality spoils any attempt at serious appreciation. But since it was Clive James's literary enthusiasm that ignited, and has so generously fuelled, my own, it will be entirely sentimental feelings that I experience on the day I see his obituary, which is why I will end now with a final expression of gratitude for my mentor.
Clive James has lived, appreciated and written with an intensity that will not be contained by the span his of years. His legacy will be to provide us all with reading for life.
Clive James was diagnosed with leukemia in April 2011. In June 2012 he described himself as “near the end”. In 2015 he upgraded his condition to “embarrassed” because he was still alive. As I type this sentence on the 6th May 2018, I believe that alive-but-embarrassed-about-it may continue to be the state of things for my ailing Virgil, which I am happy about, though I lament the reduction in the volume of his output. In the past few years he has produced a weekly column entitled “Reports of my Death...” for The Guardian, and a volume of essays reviewing the DVD boxsets he has binge-watched whilst ill. But my hope of seeing a sixth volume of his memoirs is fading, and I know we'll never see another collection of essays to rival The Meaning of Recognition or Even As We Speak, which is why I have been keen to compose these lines before we learn that his TV-viewing days have come to an end. Clive James once wrote Requiem, a piece devoted to his grief following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I found it unreadable. I don't doubt the sincerity of the emotion that inspired it – indeed, James's bleak mood must have been the reason for such a poorly judged piece – but I am keen to avoid making a similar mistake. Sentimentality spoils any attempt at serious appreciation. But since it was Clive James's literary enthusiasm that ignited, and has so generously fuelled, my own, it will be entirely sentimental feelings that I experience on the day I see his obituary, which is why I will end now with a final expression of gratitude for my mentor.
Clive James has lived, appreciated and written with an intensity that will not be contained by the span his of years. His legacy will be to provide us all with reading for life.
Considering this,
and acknowledging the influence he will continue to have on my
own attempts to appreciate the world as acutely and as articulately as he
does, I will always consider reports of Clive James's death to have
been greatly exaggerated.
I serve the joy-spring of the language. Let
Me pass, therefore. I am not finished yet
–Night-Walker's Song
I serve the joy-spring of the language. Let
Me pass, therefore. I am not finished yet
–Night-Walker's Song
© Mark Crutchfield, May 2018
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